The present inventions are related to systems and methods for accessing a storage medium, and more particularly to systems and methods for determining the location of a read/write head assembly in relation to a storage medium.
Writing information to a magnetic storage medium includes generating a magnetic field in close proximity to the storage medium to be written. This may be done using a read/write head assembly as are commonly known in the art, and is highly dependent on properly positioning the read/write head assembly in relation to a magnetic storage medium. The distance between the read/write head assembly and the storage medium is commonly referred to as fly-height. Proper control of the fly-height helps to assure that the read back signal exhibits the best possible signal-to-noise ratio, and thereby improves performance. In a typical implementation, fly-height is determined based on harmonic measurements during a non-operational period. Such an approach uses a vacant or dedicated area on the magnetic storage medium to write a periodic pattern from which the harmonics may be measured. While the approach provides a reasonable static estimate of fly-height, it does not provide an indication of any change in fly-height occurring during standard operational periods. As such, the approaches do not provide an ability to adjust for changes occurring during the operation of the disk. Other approaches use channel bit density (CBD) estimation to determine fly-height. This approach relies on estimating the CBD from various ADC samples by means of a de-convolution approach. This is based on truncating the correlation-length of the channel impulse response, and approximating the channel impulse response by the dipulse (bit) response. The de-convolution requires matrix inversion, and it becomes very difficult to implement the matrix inversion as the matrix size increases, which it does as the truncation length of the channel correlation is relaxed. It is also difficult to use this approach to obtain the CBD variation in continuous fashion, as it works on a block by block basis. Yet other approaches use an available AGC signal for inferring the fly-height. Such an approach is able to continuously monitor fly-height during normal operational periods, however, the accuracy of the approach is significantly diminished due to PVT-induced variations in the signal/circuits. None of the aforementioned approaches facilitate fly-height monitoring and control during normal write operations.
Hence, for at least the aforementioned reasons, there exists a need in the art for advanced systems and methods for determining fly-height.